E-tools and PCGen

[Filthbeard]

Hi,

I picked up e-tools today. I am happy with it in some respects and displeased with others. It will be very useful in creating encounters from the monster manual. Making treasure lists, and basic characters. It allows you to input custum races, gods, feats, spells, weapons, armor, shields, art, gems, skills, domains, magic items, languages. You can make custum monsters, generate random characters. You can make tables. All in an easy to use pop up interface.

For some reason it doesn't have a prestige class input. That is one major gripe about it. I far as I can tell, I can input anything from any of my books, except the prestige classes. It also does not give option of random npc classes in the random character generator (i.e. warrior, adept, etc.) just PC classes.

I am aware that some strange business discisions preceded its release. I would have liked to see more WOTC products supported by it. By this I mean, I own FRCS, monsters of Faerun, Song and Silence, and a shelf worth of other WOTC D&D products. I would have gladly paided a lot more, if they had been already in the data. I will have to spend freetime keying in this data, instead of just using the program. That is annoying, because I would rather spend freetime preparing a game, painting figures, fishing, or collecting fossils.

My verdict on e-tools, it is somewhat useful, but could have used a couple of more features. Hopefully, they will be added in product updates.

PCgen I also use, I like it a lot. I think it is currently a lot better at generating a character. E-tools is better at making encounter stat blocks and treasure, but only if your using just the MM. However, you could key in the monsters from another book.

I am not unhappy I bought e-tools, but I am not super pleased with it, in its current version.

 

[Christian]

I would have gladly paided a lot more, if they had been already in the data. I will have to spend freetime keying in this data, instead of just using the program. That is annoying, because I would rather spend freetime preparing a game, painting figures, fishing, or collecting fossils.

Well, there's your problem! You have too many hobbies!



Patience, grasshopper. There is/will be a fairly large community of users building add-ins to the database. There's already a third-party application that works for database imports/exports so people can share their labor ... and I'm sure that there are some hot Access programmers waiting for their copies to come so they can see what else they're able to do with the backend. I know of one for certain, anyway ...

(RPGStrategy.com tells me they shipped my copy today! )

Prestige classes may be a problem. Some will work fine, but I understand that there were coding problems with working in the '+1 level of a previous spellcasting class' abilities. In any case, you'll be seeing some add-ins floating around before long ... check out the Fluid boards for some more info.

 

[HexGunna]

E(gads)-Tools....

Bottom line - I don't like it, took it back to my FLGS and Steve (the owner - bless the man) promptly gave me my money back.
I'll stick w/ PCGen, in fact I wanna send those guys my $30.00.
I wanted to like it, wanted to spend the money, would've spent twice that. It didn't deliver for me.

I get for FREE in PCGen what E-Tools can do, with less of a fight from the Interface. And I don't use enough of the random tables and stuff to warrant buying software for -> JB online stuff does what I need the few times I need it.
And While I can appreciate the accessibility of the MSAccess DB -
I'm not spending the time working on a better interface OR for a 3rd party (free or no) to provide for a $30 product that does what my FREE one already does.

There is a TON of bad hateful Non-Constructive things I'd like to spout off about E-tools, but it comes down to fighting the interface and it's GUI violations on top of offering what I already have. I didn't like it, didn't think I got my money's worth, it felt very clunky. Not worth my cash. And I've bought some D.A.S in my time!!

YMMV!

 

[Feaelin]

Oddly, I have the opposite opinion.

I evaluated PCGen for usefulness recently and found it to be too slow, and I found the interface very counter-intuitive, and also I didn't like how it was very "locked in" in a lot of ways (it enforced things I didn't want enforced, etc.) so after a couple of hours of fiddling with it, I think I deleted it entirely.

E-Tools, is better, but not much better, at least for a player. I find the interface to be more easily figured out than PCGen (although still a little unexected/non-standard), and appears to be somewhat faster.

I "re-created" my 9th level dwarven cleric in it today, in about 40 minutes, even with having to stop to add a spell, a couple of items (he carries around a statue he made of a dwarf he's fond of), and spent some time picking spells to be prepared. It wasn't too difficult to figure out what I wanted to do the first time, which is important when you're in a hurry to get your character printed!

Unfortunately, the printing didn't turn out perfectly. I could read everything, and all the information was there, but the paging wasn't "quite right". I wondered if IE _wouldn't print the file name and the page x of y stuff, if the paging was correct, but I've not taken the time to see how to turn that off.

For a gamemaster, it may be a much more useful tool. I've seen most of the pieces of e-tools in various downable applets and things, but it's pretty nice so far be able to hop from one part of the tool to another.

Re: Prestige Classes
Having tinkered with my own flavor of character utility, I can understand why they don't have a class/prestige class editor. Classes tend to have many weird, and obnoxious specials that don't "normalize" well. It's easy to look at the book and perceive the prestige class as a list of powers/abilities, but where you run into trouble is where those powers/abilities "permanently" change statistical info...a prestige class editor would have to anticipate a wide array of statistical modifiers, some of which are sometimes fairly oddball. The prerequisites present a similar problem.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but I imagine that it proved to be more complicated than could be done in a reasonable amount of time...and this product has been delayed too many times already!

Hopefully, someone ambitious will sit down and tinker with the database and offer "extended features" to the rest of us. I certainly intend to tinker with it myself, adding what ever I can figure out a way to add.

Christian, could you present the url for the third party import/export tool? Does it differ greatly from MS-Access' own export/import utility?

 

[Christian]

Last I heard, it wasn't done ... I know it's not being distributed yet. Stay tuned to the Fluid boards-the author posts regularly.

EN makes reference to it on this thread below. So you know it's true!

 

[Davin]

Christian, could you present the url for the third party import/export tool?

Hi there!

It's mine.
It's called ET Helper [DBSets module].
I just released it for beta testing this evening.
You can take a look at it at www.dallas.net/~davin (download both ZIP files and unzip them to the same directory).

Have fun, and let me know if you run into any problems with it!

 

[smetzger]

I must say that PCGen is much speedier than the Fluid boards

 

[Feaelin]

I'd agree with that smetzger! Every post I made last night took forever to update!

 

[Sm!rk]

So are you saying something exists *slower* than Java?